Former Guardian editor and media standards bloviator Alan Rusbridger has been spending his time appearing in broadcast studios and writing articles on his special investigation into GB News. He claims that the channel is “driving a coach and horses through the laws that were put in place to define broadcasting in the UK” and that Ofcom has “more or less given up the ghost”…
Rusbridger seems to have forgotten his own record on media accountability. In 2020 he was appointed to the Irish’s government “Future of Media” commission, which was tasked with upholding journalistic standards. One year later Rusbridger was was forced to resign from it over a piece that Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade had written in 2014 – while Rusbridger was editor…
Greenslade wrote a piece stating that the BBC had been “too willing to accept” a statement from Máiría Cahill, a former Labour Senator, that she was raped by an alleged member of the IRA when she was 16. Rusbridger reportedly said he knew at the time that Greenslade was a supporter of Sinn Fein. In 2021, the issue resurfaced when Greenslade admitted to being “in complete agreement about the right of the Irish people to engage in armed struggle.” Even the Guardian’s “readers editor” said Greenslade “ought to have been open about his position,” and Rusbridger’s successor Katherine Viner said it “was not handled appropriately.“ Something something glass houses…
Under the editorship of former Guardian bigwig Alan Rusbridger, Prospect magazine has gone from an interesting and even occasionally balanced intellectual journal to an eyeball-crushingly dull and worthy parish newsletter for the liberal establishment. Sad times…
Guido hears from multiple newsroom sources – who have revealed their internal correspondence – that the magazine has hit tough times, with Rusbridger recently issuing an edict that its external commissions must be pared back. “We’ve gone from commissioning whatever we like to a max of a few bits a week“, said one disgruntled scribbler. Repeated, rehashed attacks on the Murdoch media have failed to garner the magazine the revival it had sought…
“We’re becoming super parochial”, said another. The ‘Prospect’ of job losses abounds…
“I’ve been retired seven years and I’m very happy not working” says Nick Davies as he returns to work on a podcast about a very old Fleet Street topic: phone hacking. Davies – a blast from Guido’s past – is indeed peddling a series of turgid articles in liberal doorstop Prospect magazine, covering every dash and comma of reheated claims about the Murdoch empire. Is the Guardian pension scheme not generous enough…
Interviewed and edited by his erstwhile former editor, Alan Rusbridger, Davies explains in the first episode:
“We have to be quote ‘fair and accurate’… otherwise we could be sued for libel… We are at the stage of allegation and untested evidence. And where the Murdoch company is concerned that’s still waiting for judgement… with Murdoch, it’s untested evidence”.
Rusbridger continues separately:
“The usual legal disclaimer… this is all based on documents that have come out during assorted court cases… and they are allegations. It’s just important to say that… this is a situation where Nick is reporting… what one side says about them”.
So much for the ‘balanced analysis’ Prospect boasts in its marketing copy. It’s an unusual leap out of retirement for Davies, who says of himself in his own website bio: “He was last seen somewhere between a meditation retreat in northern Thailand and an inner city suburb of Medellin, Colombia.” Lovely this time of year…
In GQ, Michael Wolff reveals Alan Rusbridger’s view of the Guardian:
“For more than a decade Rusbridger has held [the] assumption that the Guardian, that most British of British left-wing institutions, was finished in the UK… Rusbridger is said to be unwavering in his belief… the Guardian’s UK business is dying… the Guardian is either a thing of the past or on a suicide mission.”
Speaking to Sky News off the back of Rachel Reeves’ Air Passenger Duty hike, Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said:
“Labour is dependent on those Red Wall seats, and yet every move she makes poisons economic growth and damages the UK’s recovery… it’s the Chancellor who stumbles from policy misstep to policy misstep… I think her policy decisions are incredibly stupid.”